An analysis of religious belief

by viscount John Russell Amberley

Of these, the first and fourth are never suffered to pass without religious observances, or at least, observances which, by their solemnity and indispensable obligation, approach to a religious character. The second is usually marked by some kind of rite in the case of males; in that of females it is often suffered to pass unobserved. The third is always placed under a religious sanction, except among savages of a very low order.

Let us proceed to illustrate these propositions in the case of birth. The ceremonies attendant upon this event need not take place immediately after it; they may be deferred some days, weeks, or months; they will still fall under the same category, as designed to mark the child's entry into the world. Their form will naturally vary according to the state of civilization of the nation observing them; but notwithstanding this there is a strange similarity among them. In Samoa, for instance, "if the little stranger was a boy, the umbilicus was cut on a club, that he might grow up to be brave in war. If of the other sex, it was done on the board on which they beat out the bark of which they make their native cloth. Cloth-making is the work of women; and their wish was, that the little girl should grow up and prove useful to the family in her proper occupation" (N. Y., p. 175). I have added Mr. Turner's observation to render the nature of this ceremony plainer. It appears hardly religious; yet when we consider the symbolical means by which the end is sought to be attained, and that among savages so rude as those of Polynesia religion would have no higher practical aims than to make the boys good warriors, and the women industrious cloth-makers, we may admit that even this elementary rite has in it something of a religious consecration. When secular objects are attained by mystical ceremonials, which have no direct tendency to produce the desired result, we may generally conclude that religious belief is at the bottom of them. In the present instance this conclusion is still further strengthened by the description given by the same author of a similar ceremony in another island of the Polynesian group. There, when a boy is born, "a priest cuts the umbilicus on a particular stone from Lifu, that the youth may be stone-hearted in battle. The priest, too, at the moment of the operation, must have a vessel of water before him, dyed black as ink, that the boy when he grows up, may be courageous to go anywhere to battle on a pitch-dark night, and thus, from his very birth, the little fellow is consecrated to war" (N. Y., pp. 423, 424). Here the religious nature of the operation is explicitly proved by the presence of the priest, the inevitable agent in such communications between God and man. Another missionary to the same race—the Polynesian islanders—informs us that among these people mothers dedicated their offspring to various deities, but principally to Hiro, the god of thieves, and Oro, the god of war. "Most parents, however, were anxious that their children should become brave and renowned warriors," and with this end they dedicated them, by means of ceremonies beginning before parturition, and ending after it, to the god Oro. The principal ceremony after birth consisted in the priest catching the spirit of the god, by a peculiar process, and imparting it to the child. Here again the presence of the priest, and the formal dedication to a god—even though he be a god of questionable morality—render the religious element in the natal ceremonies of these very primitive savages abundantly plain (N. M. E., p. 543).

Baptism, or washing at birth, is a common process, and is found in countries the most widely separated on the face of the earth, and the most unconnected in religious genealogy. Asia, America, and Europe alike present us with examples of this rite. It seems to be a rude form of it which prevails in Fantee in Africa, where the father, on the eighth day after birth, after thanking the gods for the birth of his child, squirts some ardent spirits upon him from his mouth, and then pronounces his name, at the same time praying for his future welfare, and "that he may live to be old, and become a stay and support to his family," and if his namesake be living, that he may prove worthy of the name he has received (Asha, p. 226). A rite of baptism at birth, says Brinton, "was of immemorial antiquity among the Cherokees, Aztecs, Mayas, and Peruvians," and this rite was "connected with the imposing of a name, done avowedly for the purpose of freeing from inherent sin, believed to produce a spiritual regeneration, nay, in more than one instance, called by an indigenous word signifying 'to be born again'" (M. N. W., p. 128). Mexico possessed elaborate rites to consecrate nativity. When the Mexican infant was four days old it was carried naked by the midwife into the court of the mother's house. Here it was bathed in a vessel prepared for the purpose, and three boys, who were engaged in eating a special food, were desired by the midwife to pronounce its name aloud, this name being prescribed to them by her. The infant, if a boy, carried with it the symbol of its father's profession; if a girl, a spinning-wheel and distaff, with a small basket and a handful of brooms, to indicate its future occupation. The umbilical cord was then offered with the symbols; and in case of a male infant, these objects were buried in the place where war was likely to occur; in case of a female infant, beneath the stone where meal was ground.[3] The above statements rest on the authority of Mendoza's collection. A still more complete narrative of these baptismal ceremonies is given by Bernardino de Sahagun, who records the terms of the prayers habitually employed by the officiating midwife. Their extreme interest to the study of comparative religion will justify me in extracting some of them, the more so as they have never (so far as I am aware) been published in English.[4]

Suppose that the infant to be baptized was a boy. After the symbolical military apparatus had been prepared, and all the relatives assembled in the court of the parents' house, the midwife placed it with the head to the East, and prayed for a blessing from the god Quetzalcoatl and the goddess of the water, Chalchivitlycue. She then gave it water to taste by moistening the fingers, and spoke as follows: "Take, receive; thou seest here that with which thou hast to live on earth, that thou mayest grow and flourish: this it is to which we owe the necessaries of life, that we may live on earth: receive it." Hereupon, having touched its breast with the fingers dipped in water, she continued: "Omictomx! O my child! receive the water of the Lord of the world, which is our life, and by which our body grows and flourishes: it is to wash and to purify; may this sky-blue and light-blue water enter thy body and there live. May it destroy and separate from thee all the evil that was beginning in thee before the beginning of the world, since all of us men are subject to its power, for our mother is Chalchivitlycue." After this she washed the child's whole body with water, and proceeded to request all things that might injure him to depart from him, "that now he may live again, and be born again: now a second time he is purified and cleansed, and a second time our mother Chalchivitlycue forms and begets him." Then lifting the child in both hands towards the sky, she said: "O Lord, thou seest here thy child whom thou hast sent to this world of pain, affliction, and penitence: give him, O Lord, thy gifts and thy inspiration, for thou art the great God, and great is the goddess also." After this she deposited the infant on the ground, and then raising it a second time towards the sky, implored the "mother of heaven" to endow it with her virtue. Next, having again laid it down, and a third time lifted it up, she offered this prayer: "O Lords, the gods of heaven! here is this child; be pleased to inspire him with your grace and your spirit, that he may live on earth." After a final depositing she raised him a fourth time towards the sky, and in a prayer, addressed to the sun, solemnly placed him under the protection of that deity. Taking the weapons she proceeded further to implore the sun on his behalf for military virtues: "Grant him the gift that thou art wont to give thy soldiers, that he may go full of joy to thy house, where valiant soldiers who die in war rest and are happy." While all this was going on, a large torch of candlewood was kept burning; and on conclusion of the prayers the midwife gave the infant some ancestral name. Let it be Yautl (which means valiant man): then she addressed him thus: "Yautl! take thou the shield! take the dart! for those are thy recreation, and the joys of the sun." The completion of the religious office was signalized by the youths of the village coming in a body to the house and seizing the food prepared for them, which they called "the child's umbilicus." As they went along with this food they shouted out a sort of military exhortation to the new-born boy, and called upon the soldiers to come and eat the (so-called) umbilicus. All being over, the infant was carried back to the house, preceded by the blazing torch. Much the same was the process of baptizing a girl, except that the clothes and implements were suited to her sex. In her case, certain formularies were muttered by the midwife during the washing, in a low, inaudible tone, to the several parts of her body: thus she charged the hands not to steal, the secret parts not to be carnal, and so forth with each member as she washed it. Moreover, a prayer to the cradle, which seems in a manner to personify the universal mother earth, was introduced in the baptism of females (C. N. E. b. 6, chs. 37, 38).

If from heathen America we turn to Asia, we find that in the vast domain of the Buddhist faith the birth of children is regularly the occasion of a ceremony at which the priest is present (R. B. vol. i. p. 584,) and that in Mongolia and Thibet this ceremony assumes the special form of baptism. Candles burn, and incense is offered on the domestic altar; the priest reads the prescribed prayers, dips the child three times, and imposes on it a name (R. B. vol. ii. p. 320). A species of baptism prevails also among the Parsees, and was even enjoined by the Parsee Leviticus, the Vendidad. This very ancient code required that the child's hands should be washed first, and then its whole body (Av. vol. ii. p. xix—Vendidad, xvi. 18-20). The modern practice goes further. Before putting it to the breast, the Parsee mother sends to a Mobed (or priest), to obtain some Haoma juice; she steeps some cotton in it, and presses this into the child's mouth. After this, it must be washed three times in cow's urine, and once in water, the reason assigned being that it is impure. If the washing be omitted, it is the parents, not the child, who bear the sin (Z. A., vol. ii. p. 551).

Slightly different in form, but altogether similar in essence, is the rite administered by the Christian Church to its new-born members. Like those which have been just described, it consists in baptism; but it offers a more remarkable instance than any of them of the tenacity with which the human mind, under the influence of religious belief, insists upon the performance of some kind of ceremony immediately after, or, at the most, at no great interval after birth. Christian baptism was not originally intended to be administered to unconscious infants, but to persons in full possession of their faculties, and responsible for their actions. Moreover, it was performed, as is well known, not by merely sprinkling the forehead, but by causing the candidate to descend naked into the water, the priest joining him there, and pouring the water over his head. The catechumen could not receive baptism until after he understood something of the nature of the faith he was embracing, and was prepared to assume its obligations. A rite more totally unfitted for administration to infants could hardly have been found. Yet such was the need that was felt for a solemn recognition by religion of the entrance of the child into the world, that this rite, in course of time, completely lost its original nature. Infancy took the place of maturity; sprinkling of immersion. But while the age and manner of baptism were altered, the ritual remained under the influence of the primitive idea with which it had been instituted. The obligations could no longer be undertaken by the persons baptized; hence they must be undertaken for them. Thus was the Christian Church landed in the absurdity—unparalleled, I believe, in any other natal ceremony—of requiring the most solemn promises to be made, not by those who were thereafter to fulfil them, but by others in their name; these others having no power to enforce their fulfillment, and neither those actually assuming the engagement, nor those on whose behalf it was assumed, being morally responsible in case it should be broken. Yet this strange incongruity was forced upon the Church by an imperious want of human nature itself; and the insignificant sects who have adopted the baptism of adults have failed, in their zeal for historical consistency, to recognize a sentiment whose roots lie far deeper than the chronological foundation of Christian rites, and stretch far wider than the geographical boundaries of the Christian faith.

The intention of all these forms of baptism—that of Ashantee perhaps excepted—is identical. Water, as the natural means of physical cleansing, is the universal symbol of spiritual purification. Hence immersion, or washing, or sprinkling, implies the deliverance of the infant from the stain of original sin. The Mexican and Christian rituals are perfectly clear on this head. In both, the avowed intention is to wash away the sinful nature common to humanity; in both the infant is declared to be born again by the agency of water.

Another ceremony very frequently practised at the birth of children is circumcision. The wide-spread existence of this rite is one of the most remarkable facts in comparative religious history. We know from Herodotus, that it was practised by the Colchians, Egyptians, Ethiopians, and Phœnicians (Herod., ii. 104). It has been found in modern times, not only in many parts of Africa—to which it may have come from Egypt—but in the South Sea Islands and on the American continent. Thus, according to Beecham, there are "some people," among the Gold Coast Africans, who circumcise their children (Asha, p. 225), though what proportion these circumcisers bear to the rest of the population, he does not inform us. Another traveler describes the mode of circumcising infants in the Negro kingdom of Fida or Juda, a country to which he believes that Islamism has not penetrated (V. G. vol. ii. p. 159). The operation is very simple, and appears to be done without any religious ceremony; but the natives, when pressed as to the reason of the custom, can only reply that their ancestors observed it—an answer which would properly apply to a rite of religious origin whose meaning has been forgotten. Acosta, in his account of Mexican baptism, adds that a ceremony which in some sort imitated the circumcision of the Jews, was occasionally performed by the Mexicans in their baptism, principally on the children of kings and noblemen. It consisted in cutting the ears and private members of male infants (H. I., b. 5, ch. 26 No. 2). That the Jews circumcise their male children on the eighth day I need not state. The rite is performed with much solemnity, and is connected, as is common in these ceremonies, with the bestowal of a name on the child, the name being given by the father after the operation is over. Although circumcision is a ceremony which usually applies only to boys, and although it sometimes happens that the birth of girls is not marked like that of boys by any religious rite, yet the Jews do not omit to consecrate their female children as well as those of the stronger sex, though with less solemnity. "The first Saturday after the end of the month" of the mother's lying-in, she goes to the synagogue with her friends, where "the father of the girl is called up to the law on the altar, and there after a chapter hath been read to him as usual on the Sabbath morning, he orders the reader to say a Mee-Shabeyrach," or a prayer for a blessing (Rel. of Jews, p. 27 1st part).

It is unnecessary, after these instances, to describe the various modes of consecrating the commencement of life which are in use in other countries. Enough has been said to show how general, if not how universal, such consecrating usages are; how religion, supported by the sentiment of mankind, seizes upon the life of the individual from the first moments of his existence; and demands, as one of the very earliest actions to be performed on his behalf, a solemn recognition of the fact that he stands under the influence, and needs the protection, of an invisible and superhuman power.

After birth, the next marked epoch in life is the arrival at manhood or at womanhood. The transition from infancy to maturity, from dependence on others to self-dependence, from an unsexual to a sexual physical and mental condition, has, like the actual entrance upon life and departure from it, been appropriated by religion with a view to its consecration by fitting rites. Since there is no precise time at which the boy can be said to become a youth, or the girl a maiden, the age at which the ceremonies attending puberty are performed varies very considerably in different countries. The range of variation is from eight to sixteen, though there are exceptional cases both of earlier and later initiation into the new stage of existence. Generally speaking, however, these ages are the limits within which the religious solemnities of puberty are confined.